Composer Chin Un-suk wins Siemens Music Prize

South Korean composer Chin Un-suk, art director of the Tongyeong International Music Festival, was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize on Thursday. She has become the first Asian musician to claim the prize presented jointly by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Winning the Siemens Music Prize is considered so highly honorable that it is even likened to the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal of Classical Music. Each year, only one artist aged 60 or above is selected across all the fields of classical music and earns 250,000 euros (about 360 million won).

The winning of this year’s Siemens Music Award brought Chin to the most extraordinary dignity of the music field, adding the award to the long list of prizes she received including the 2004 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, the 2005 Arnold Schönberg Prize, the 2010 Music Composition Prize of the Prince Pierre Foundation for Gougalōn, the 2017 Wihuri Sibelius Prize, the 2018 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, the 2019 Bach Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the 2021 Léonie Sonning Music Prize.

The 62-year-old composer said that she is delighted to be awarded this prize in Germany, where she feels at home, describing it as the most incredible honor she has ever had in her music career, according to the secretariat of the Tongyeong International Music Festival on Thursday.


gustav@donga.com